All I can say is, it’s been my subjective experience that competence and productivity are really variable. Some people at my company can produce beautiful, working, end to end solutions for complex problems in the time it takes others to grind out trivial maintenance tickets. Everyone knows who they are. Programmers are not basically all the same, and it’s worth thinking about the nature of the differences if you want to become one of those people, hire them, retain them, grow your team to be more like them, etc. To write them all off as myths, children, assholes, etc. is to reject the possibility of substantially improving at our craft. That’s a dangerous thing to do.